With the improvement of people's living standards, display devices, particularly flat panel display devices, have become essential household appliances in people's lives. For hundreds of millions of families in China, assuming that each family has their display device turning on for one hour on average every day, energy consumed for watching TV programs every day is amazing. Hence, striving for energy saving, while enjoying TV programs, becomes one of important indexes to be considered in the display technology.
To achieve the purpose of energy saving, there has been proposed an energy-saving control method wherein a sensor is provided on the display device, and the power supply of the display device is cut off or the display device is switched into a standby mode when the sensor detects that there is no person in the room. However, such control method has a disadvantage that the display device may be always kept in an ON state once there is a person in the room.
It has been found by researches that, when the display device is in the ON state, people may not promptly turn the display device off for various reasons even if they have no demand of watching display contents such as TV programs. In this case, extra waste of energy is caused. For example, it is common that people do not turn the display device off even when they are chatting, reading a newspaper, checking their mobile phones, having a rest or sleeping and have no demand of watching TV programs. These situations cause not only a waste of energy, but also wear and tear in use of the display device which shortens service life of the display device.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a power supply control method that can smartly cut the power supply off when the person in the room has no demand of watching the content displayed on the display device, and a display device.